The British royal family is considered by many to be the most prestigious in the world.
Yet its sensational and often lurid past contains deeds so dark and dastardly that they were covered up and remained secret for centuries.
Over the last thousand years or so, many of the kings and queens of England have played their part in betrayals, regicides, plots, treason, atrocities, and revolts. The English throne has been usurped four times. There have been five pretenders to the crown, two of them impostors. Four kings have been forcibly deposed. All were subsequently murdered. One of them was publicly executed.
Kings and queens of England have been responsible for thousands of executions and deaths. Tudor king Henry VIII set out to exterminate every surviving member of the Plantagenets, the dynasty that preceded his own. And Henry’s daughter, Queen Mary I, burned 300 Protestants at the stake.
English royalty was a regular target for conspiracies and assassination attempts. Queen Elizabeth I was at constant risk from plotters who wanted to kill her and replace her with her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was a Catholic conspiracy to blow up King James I, his government and the Houses of Parliament.
Two kings of England went mad. One was kidnapped, and another was mercilessly bullied by his own nobles. King Henry VIII, who married six times, hounded his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to her death in 1536. Later, he executed his second and fifth wives.
While King George IV was Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, he incurred so many debts that he had to be bailed out – twice – by Parliament. His father, King George III, derived little pleasure from his family of 15 children, many of whom were enveloped in scandal. Two of his offspring were suspected of incest, and his sons provided him with an army of illegitimate grandchildren.
Henry VIII, shown here with Pope Leo X, was a sincere Roman Catholic, but that did not stop him from breaking his ties with Rome when the pope would not grant him a divorce.
Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, tried to raise the moral standards of royalty, but they were frustrated by their eldest son, the future King Edward VII, who enjoyed nothing more than drinking, gambling and womanizing to excess.
In 1936 King Edward VIII nearly wrecked the monarchy when he abdicated to marry the unsuitable, twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. More recently, the royal family has been rocked to its foundations by the Charles and Diana scandals.
This book pulls no punches in telling the whole shameful story of royal deeds that were never intended to be revealed.
A detail from the invitation to the fireworks display held to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902.
A late fifteenth-century portrayal of the death of William II. The King is shown lying on the ground with the fatal arrow in his chest at the top left of the picture.
